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My router has a firewall which might be the reason, but I see no reason to enable it for two apps (one of which is broken anyway: I managed to accidentally run a dist-upgrade via apt-get on the N900, which totally breaks Nokia's program manager — no more updates though, so no point reflashing the thing).

Trust me, I'll use the CPU, but not for office documents. I'd use 4 GB RAM too if I could get it; I use it on my laptop. I do software dev., and compilers, besides some IDEs like kdevelop, are pretty memory hungry.

You want to do software development on a smartphone?

Very futuristic :P I guess even a dual core 1,4gHz ARM isn't going to do you much good ;P

Why the hell not? Think about the sort of computers we had ten years ago... of course, I'll be running modern software on it, but not all of it is so resource hungry.

If that kind of stuff is doable on todays mobile devices then that means that mobile computing is maturing a lot. First we had web apps, then dedicated fart apps, then some more capable apps for video editing. Software development is the kind of thing that matures these devices into a self-hosting kind of thing.

b15hop: not sure about the "upgrade wall" and I do hope you recycle your old phones rather than just check them in the bin, but yes, novelty is probably the main reason running a full-blown OS on them isn't so easy. Have you never used a web-store or written notes on a phone?

The big limitation though is input and output. Motorola's atrix with laptop-dock is a simple way of solving that (although pretty pointless since if you're carrying around that much hardware you might as well pack a bigger CPU too). I can see only perhaps two ways phones end up doing more than things which are easy to do on a phone screen: universal docks (where you can just plug your phone into your mate's screen and keyboard) and inovative input devices which for various reasons have never been massively successful so far: chorded, gesture-based or voice input, and head-mounted displays (or maybe even minature projectors).

Well the last phone has lasted me 4 years because I treat a phone as a phone. I'll wait until smart phones become more of a commodity before I upgrade... Either that or I'll go full hog and buy a Tegra2 based phone with duel core cpu. I dunno... I seem to be more concerned about battery life, telephone reception (good signal) and toughness than processing performance. I leave performance to the desktop.

I also write notes on the phone but I'm careful as to what I write as it can be a security issue. Assuming the phone is lost or stolen.

PS: I destroyed my last phone, and didn't recycle. They don't provide very good recycling facilities here in West Australia. It's something that's council dependant as some councils provide such features in their locality. Slowly getting there as I notice the nearby shops have can / glass / bottle bins now but that's about it...

If that kind of stuff is doable on todays mobile devices then that means that mobile computing is maturing a lot. First we had web apps, then dedicated fart apps, then some more capable apps for video editing. Software development is the kind of thing that matures these devices into a self-hosting kind of thing.

Fixing an Android bug with your Android device ^^,

I also believe Android is hacked up OS. On the other hand, the desktop operating systems are well matured. Linux rolling release has improved over time. In comparison, I look at Java apps and Android / iOS... I think of cheap quick fixes. I don't think of long lasting well built software. I also think of slow cumbersome, poorly optimised architecture. BUT, there are good things out of all of this sudden mobility market. Phone companies (much like games consoles) have been able to build new systems from scratch. Effectively starting from fresh which means less bloat and sometimes cleaner design. I say sometimes cleaner because they don't need to carry backwards compatibility bloat with them. They can effectively build a machine which works well from day one with a good design.

Though, knowing that, phones will start to see the same problems of compatibility in time. The same problems that PC platform has experienced in decades. This is why I believe phones will hit an advancement wall. Mobile technology has just been playing catch up, they're not really improving as such... I don't think people understand smart phone limitations. In time the limitations will be more obvious. Maybe it will be more obvious when the technology catch-up calms down...

Heh, wait until you meet android; the various forks (all non-stock Android versions) and their versions in combination with all the different HW... It's like praying for your app to work et all! Seriously, experience here. It's like a 50-50 chance anything works correctly, if at all...

Heh... I had Symbian before that (twice). It wasn't so flashy as Android, but at least I could make a call after four hours of full use. And let's face it; Opera beats the crap out of Dolphin. The fragmentation of software in Android, the bugs, the fact that sync meant syncing every second (instead of every x mins you can setup with Symbian^3), no good VPN, horrible keyboards, incompatible widgets with other homescreens (oh fast... wait nothing works!), horrible refill bugs, battery and data hungry navigation with Google Maps, horrible this, crashing that...

I know... Symbian^3 is way behind the flashy new HTC Sence and all that stuff, the menu's take a bit of learning (like we didn't always do that before the iPhone came out), but people with brain matter actually thought about what the fsck I want my phone to do:
-Work;
-Not crash;
-Last longer than a half-hour webbrowser session, so I can, you know, make a call?

No I came screaming back to that Symbian(^3) (with way better apps than Android BTW) that has always worked. But enjoy the sexy homescreen effects of Androids...

Should try to get a stock android phone (using nexus s). I've had extremely rare cases of it spontaneously restarting and background apps slowing things down but not bad otherwise.
As long as you know what you are putting on a stock android image it should(TM) be fine in my experience.
Battery life isn't great compared to a "feature" phone but not horrible. GPS is really the big killer from what I've seen. When on 3G and using gps for navigation it probably will, depending very heavily on signal strength, only last 6-8hrs by my estimation. Of course this was also keeping the screen on (auto brightness) and gpu usage fairly high to draw the all maps.
If I leave data on all day(both wwlan and wlan) with only occasional gps is is usually(TM) around 20-25% at days end. Not horrible, but we know Apple and Win7 have done better. I'm assuming it is Java so there seems little Goog can do about it now...well, if they used native code for THEIR apps then at least you could get an android experience that had good battery.